Enterprises are caught in a desktop dilemma. On one hand, information technology (IT) organizations face pressures to control costs and ensure compliance, manageability, and security. On the other hand, end users increasingly require the freedom and flexibility to access their applications and data from multiple devices and locations. This desktop dilemma, which pits end-user freedom against the need for IT control, can drive up costs, impact security, and overwhelm IT resources. This dilemma is aggravated by the existing personal computer (PC)-centric computing paradigm, which is expensive to manage and restricts IT's ability to respond in an agile fashion to changing business dynamics.
To break free from this dilemma, organizations are looking for an agile, adaptive approach to computing that enables IT to balance business requirements with the needs of end users for a flexible, high-performance computer experience. Desktop virtualization with VMware Horizon View™, for example, enables organizations to do more with less and adopt a user-centric, flexible approach to computing. By decoupling applications, data, and operating system from the endpoint, and by moving these components into the datacenter where they can be centrally managed in the cloud, desktop and application virtualization offers IT a more streamlined, secure way to manage users and provide agile, on-demand desktop services. Message Security Mode allows control of all messages between the View Connection Server instances, and between the View Connection Server instances and the security servers.
The offloading of computation from mobile devices to remote cloud resources or closely located computing resources known as cloudlets has been researched. The shared devices may belong to the same household or be used by a large group of people, such as in a military or disaster scenario. In such scenarios, the incentive to collaborate on computational tasks is not an issue and the communal goal of prolonging the lifetime of the collection of devices makes sense. This incentive is further amplified if a connection to a cloud (or network) is costly, unreliable, or simply unavailable.
Research further involves the initial state of power availability in a collection of collaborative mobile devices and a set of computational tasks with known or estimated power consumption profiles on the mobile devices to determine the best approach to schedule the computation among the set of shared devices so as to maximize their lifetime.
The concept of a mobile device cloud (MDC) is derived and is determined to be a set of mobile devices functionally working together, sharing resources. Such an offloading context involves a highly collaborative context where the goal of computational offloading is to maximize the lifetime of the MDC.
Microsoft Lync Server™ is an enterprise-ready unified communications platform that builds on previous Lync Server products to connect people everywhere, on Windows machines and other devices, as part of their everyday productivity experience. Lync provides a consistent, single client experience for presence, instant messaging, voice, video and meetings.
The arrival of Microsoft's Cortana™, a digital assistant for its Windows Phone™ mobile operating system based on the voice of an intelligent computing system from the Halo™ videogame, competes directly with Apple's Siri™ and Google Now™ for the chance to organize appointments, contacts, travel arrangements, and all of the other minutiae of daily life. Microsoft™ calls Cortana™ the “truly personal digital assistant” (a thinly veiled dig at its forerunners) that analyzes how users use their phone to learn what topics they are interested in, when they are busy, and where they travel.
Cortana™ can deliver a summary of relevant news stories at the start of the day. Like a flesh-and-blood personal assistant, it also allows users to set up a “quiet time” where calls and text are silenced, as well as letting an “inner circle” of contacts break through those restrictions. The Notebook feature lets users tweak what the application knows about them, providing a more granular level of control than either Siri™ or Google Now™. In many ways, Cortana™ combines Siri's™ voice search with Google Now's™ suggestions, which are based on data like your location, the time, and your appointment calendar.
Siri™ started the digital assistant trend as an independent, stand-alone application before being acquired by Apple™ in 2010. A year later, Apple™ integrated Siri™ into iOS™ and started marketing the service as an “intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.” Over time, Siri™ has become better at recognizing and interpreting commands while linking to more apps in Apple's™ ecosystem. What it doesn't have is all of the personalization and data collection found in Google Now™ and Cortana™.
Siri™ plugs into users' emails, contacts, and calendar, but is not trying to find out everything about the user. “In some ways, the approaches each company has taken in the space is a reflection on their heritage,” says Tony Costa, a senior analyst for Forrester. “Google Now is much more like a search engine—efficient, task focused, and trying to anticipate what you need. Apple Siri is much more of a natural language voice user interface. And Cortana a bit of a blend of the two approaches.”
Google Now™ didn't premiere until 2012, but it has rapidly become a critical feature in the company's Android™ operating system. Like Siri™, it can be activated and controlled by voice, but voice isn't front and center the same way it is in Siri™ and Cortana™. Instead, Google™ emphasizes the app's ability to predict what information users need and when. Recent searches, regular travel routes, and email messages are all scanned for information the user might want to see right away, e.g., the delivery status of an Amazon™ order, the weather, the latest news about a favorite sports team, etc. In short, Google Now™ doesn't wait for the user to ask. While users can still instruct to their phone to “send an email” or “wake me up in half an hour” as is also possible with Siri™, Google Now™ adds suggestions and recommendations based on user searches, activities, and other data. Spend every Monday evening at the gym, for example, and Google Now™ will soon learn to show directions on cue every Monday.
However, while the systems discussed above offer cloud computing and enable various functionality for offering suggestions to users and interpreting and carrying out user commands, they do not provide security-based message management based on a use profile pertaining to a type of use of a user device, nor do they determine appropriate recipients for the profile. Accordingly, an improved, security-based approach to message management that takes the type of use and appropriate recipients into account may be beneficial.